Philosophy of Linguistics Handbook of the Philosophy of Science General Editors Dov M. Gabbay Paul Thagard John Woods Handbook of Philosophy of Science Volume 14 Philosophy of Linguistics Edited by Ruth Kempson King' s College London, UK Tim Fernando Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Nicholas Asher CNRS Laboratoire IRIT, Universit Paul Sabatier, France AMSTERDAM • BOSTON • HEIDELBERG • LONDON • NEW YORK • OXFORD PARIS • SAN DIEGO • SAN FRANCISCO • SINGAPORE • SYDNEY • TOKYO North Holland is an imprint of Elsevier North Holland is an imprint of Elsevier The Boulevard, Langford lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, UK Radarweg 29, PO Box 211, 1000 AE Amsterdam, The Netherlands First edition 2012 Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. 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Alternatively you can submit your request online by visiting the Elsevier web site at http://elsevier.com/locate/permissions, and selecting Obtaining permission to use Elsevier material British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN: 978-0-444-51747-0 For information on all North Holland publications visit our web site at elsevierdirect.com Printed and bound in Great Britain 12 13 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 GENERAL PREFACE Dov Gabbay, Paul Thagard, and John Woods Whenever science operates at the cutting edge of what is known, it invariably runs into philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and reality. Scientific controversies raise such questions as the relation of theory and experiment, the nature of explanation, and the extent to which science can approximate to the truth. Within particular sciences, special concerns arise about what exists and how it can be known, for example in physics about the nature of space and time, and in psychology about the nature of consciousness. Hence the philosophy of science is an essential part of the scientific investigation of the world. In recent decades, philosophy of science has become an increasingly central part of philosophy in general. Although there are still philosophers who think that theories of knowledge and reality can be developed by pure reflection, much current philosophical work finds it necessary and valuable to take into account relevant scientific findings. For example, the philosophy of mind is now closely tied to empirical psychology, and political theory often intersects with economics. Thus philosophy of science provides a valuable bridge between philosophical and scientific inquiry. More and more, the philosophy of science concerns itself not just with general issues about the nature and validity of science, but especially with particular issues that arise in specific sciences. Accordingly, we have organized this Handbook into many volumes reflecting the full range of current research in the philosophy of science. We invited volume editors who are fully involved in the specific sciences, and are delighted that they have solicited contributions by scientifically-informed philosophers and (in a few cases) philosophically-informed scientists. The result is the most comprehensive review ever provided of the philosophy of science. Here are the volumes in the Handbook: Philosophy of Science: Focal Issues, edited by Theo Kuipers. Philosophy of Physics, edited by Jeremy Butterfield and John Earman. Philosophy of Biology, edited by Mohan Matthen and Christopher Stephens. Philosophy of Mathematics, edited by Andrew Irvine. Philosophy of Logic, edited by Dale Jacquette. Philosophy of Chemistry, edited by Andrea Woody, Robin Hendry and Paul Needham. vi Dov Gabbay, Paul Thagard, and John Woods Philosophy of Statistics, edited by Prasanta S. Bandyopadhyay and Malcolm Forster. Philosophy of Information, edited by Pieter Adriaans and Johan van Benthem. Philosophy of Technology and Engineering Sciences, edited by Anthonie Meijers. Philosophy of Complex Systems, edited by Cliff Hooker. Philosophy of Ecology, edited by Bryson Brown, Kent A. Peacock and Kevin deLaplante. Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science, edited by Paul Thagard. Philosophy of Economics, edited by Uskali M¨aki. Philosophy of Linguistics, edited by Ruth Kempson, Tim Fernando and Nicholas Asher. Philosophy of Anthropology and Sociology, edited by Stephen Turner and Mark Risjord. Philosophy of Medicine, edited by Fred Gifford. Details about the contents and publishing schedule of the volumes can be found at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/bookdescription.editors/BS HPHS/description# description As general editors, we are extremely grateful to the volume editors for arranging such a distinguished array of contributors and for managing their contributions. Production of these volumes has been a huge enterprise, and our warmest thanks go to Jane Spurr and Carol Woods for putting them together. Thanks also to Lauren Schultz and Derek Coleman at Elsevier for their support and direction. CONTRIBUTORS Nicholas Asher CNRS, IRIT, Universit´ePaul Sabatier, France. [email protected] Emmon Bach University of Massachusetts, USA, and SOAS, UK [email protected] Giosu`eBaggio SISSA International School for Advanced Studies, Triest, Italy. [email protected] William O. Beeman University of Minnesota, USA. [email protected] Ronnie Cann University of Edinburgh, UK. [email protected] Philip Carr Universit´ePaul Val´ery, France. [email protected] Wynn Chao SOAS, UK. [email protected] Alexander Clark Royal Holloway University of London, UK. [email protected] Robin Cooper Gothenberg University, Sweden. [email protected] Tim Fernando Trinity College Dublin, Eire. [email protected] Peter Hagoort Radboud Univeristy of Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands. [email protected] x Contributors Wolfram Hinzen University of Durham, UK. [email protected] James R. Hurford University of Edinburgh, UK. [email protected] Ruth Kempson King’s College London, UK. [email protected] Michiel van Lambalgen University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email protected] Shalom Lappin King’s College London, UK. [email protected] Howard Lasnik University of Maryland, USA. [email protected] Sally McConnell-Ginet Cornell University, USA. [email protected] Glyn Morrill Universitat Polit`ecnicade Catalunya, Spain. [email protected] Gerald Penn University of Toronto, Canada. [email protected] Jaroslav Peregrin Academy of Sciences and University of Hradec Kr´alov´e,Czech Republic. [email protected] Robert van Rooij University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [email protected] Juan Uriagereka University of Maryland, USA. [email protected] Daniel Wedgwood University of Edinburgh, UK. [email protected] EDITORIAL PREFACE Ruth Kempson, Tim Fernando, and Nicholas Asher Ever since the nineteen-sixties, linguistics has been a central discipline of cognitive science, feeding debates within philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, logic, psychology — studies on parsing, production, memory, and acquisition — compu- tational linguistics, anthropology, applied linguistics, and even music. However, one diagnostic attribute of what it takes to be a natural language has been miss- ing from articulation of grammar formalisms. Intrinsic to language is the essential sensitivity of construal of all natural language expressions to the utterance context in which they occur and the interaction with other participants in that same utter- ance context that this context-relativity makes possible, with rich occasion-specific effects depending on particularities of the individual participants. Given the very considerable hurdles involved in grappling with this core property of language, and the lack of suitable formal tools at the time, it is perhaps not surprising that this diagnostic property of natural languages should have been set aside as peripheral when formal modelling of language took off in the mid- nineteen-sixties. However, the methodology that was then set up, despite the welcome clarity to linguistic investigation that it initially secured, has had the effect of imposing a ceiling on the kind of explanations for what the human capacity for language amounts to. The justification for setting aside such a core attribute of language was grounded in the point of departure for the methodologies for formal modelling of languages being explored in the fifties and early sixties. Figures such as Harris, Chomsky, Lambek, each in their different ways transformed language theorising by their com- mitment to articulating formal models of language [Harris, 1951; Chomsky, 1955; Lambek, 1958]. The overwhelming priority at that time was to provide a science of language meeting criteria of empirical verifiability; and context variability was not taken to be relevant to the formal specification of any system meeting such criteria. Rather, grammars were presumed to induce sets of sentences; and the first hurdle was the fact that natural languages allow for infinite variety over and above such context variability, simply because any one sentence can be indefinitely extended. This led